Ligatures in code fonts are an interesting development. I don’t have any experience with them. The most neat thing about them is that they are very much a onl

Ligatures in code fonts are an interesting development. I don’t have any experience with them. The most neat thing about them is that they are very much a only-I-need-to-use-this convenience. It doesn’t really infringe on anyone. For the most part. I used a beginner Haskell book for some course. And they used the proper symbols for some operators. But then newbies might think that the symbols used in the book is what constitutes what raw Haskell looks like, which is wrong. So that’s very inappropriate. On the other hand, this is not the same as using ligatures to display things like `==` in an editor; the former is text substitution, while the latter is purely a visual thing. And I am fine with the latter as long as it is not misleading. These visual ligatures are the closest thing that most languages will get to using “nice-looking” (subjective) symbols instead of just every combination of all the printable ASCII symbols. Now, using Unicode in some new tech is intrusive since that is a decision that affect all users of that tech. The author of this piece did do that in his Pollen by using U+25CA LOZENGE (`◊`) as the central metacharacter. I don’t know how that panned out since I haven’t used that very interesting typesetting language. Modern/new languages might want to loosen up on the aversion they have towards Unicode. But it’s a chicken and egg problem: input methods suck so most languages don’t want to burden their users with having to use symbols that don’t show up on their keyboards. And in turn input methods suck because we often don’t need anything better (at least us who are monolinguals and/or from the West). Maybe the best that languages that want to use Unicode can do is to provide Unicode symbols as an alternative by making sure that some ASCII soup can always be used instead (kind of like C’s trigraphs…).